Blair’s torture legacy will cost Britain dear

The sickeningly cosy relationship between the Tony Blair government and the murderous Gaddafi regime has long been a stain on Britain’s conscience.

As this paper has consistently argued, the former Prime Minister was desperate for oil contracts and, in order to secure them, abandoned any remaining claim to be running an ‘ethical foreign policy’.

But, even given all we already know about the Machiavellian antics of this most slippery politician, the documents being unearthed in the ransacked offices of Gaddafi’s former torturer-in-chief, Musa Kusa, are deeply shocking.

Indeed, they appear to provide evidence that, for all the carefully-worded denials, Britain’s security services, under Mr Blair, were complicit in the rendition of suspects to face certain torture overseas.

What other conclusion can be drawn from documents detailing how Abdel Hakim Belhaj - today, in a bitter irony, a senior rebel commander - was handed to Kusa’s thugs on the basis of intelligence provided by our security services?

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MI6’s Sir Mark Allen (who now works for BP, which secured lucrative oil contracts in Libya ) even apparently wrote to Kusa obsequiously saying that rendering Belhaj was ‘the least we could do for you’.

Now, in a development which would be farcical if it were not so appalling, Belhaj may sue the UK for £1million compensation, thus punishing the Cameron government, which helped to topple Gaddafi, for the crimes of its predecessors.

The Prime Minister must also be wondering how warm his relationship with the new rebel government will be, given the UK’s emerging role in the ill-treatment of one of its senior figures.

Ultimately, the task of establishing the full extent of the Blair government’s complicity in torture rests with Sir Peter Gibson’s inquiry, which must not allow ex-ministers - as Jack Straw attempted yesterday - risibly to claim they were unaware of what MI6 was doing.

But, whatever Sir Peter concludes, one thing is certain: Mr Blair’s degrading relationship with Gaddafi will cost this country dear for years to come.

Economic perils

Yesterday, as MPs returned to work, another £49billion was wiped off shares in London amid news that the service sector had suffered its steepest one-month decline in growth for a decade.

The economy is now heading for the longest downturn in modern history.

Yet the Coalition - and the posturing LibDems in particular - have begun the new term at Westminster bogged down in petty point-scoring over NHS reform, free schools and abortion.

The government will stand or fall on its handling of the financial crisis. Ministers, also distracted by peripheral issues such as phone hacking in recent months, forget this at their peril.

Back-door euthanasia

Sleeping on the job: Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer

It’s deeply worrying that since 2009 - when the BBC and liberal establishment began a noisy pro-euthanasia campaign - Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer has quietly taken no action over 31 people suspected of helping another to end their life.

In that period, no one has been charged with such an offence and the suspicion is that a regime of legalised killing has been introduced by the back door, despite Parliament twice refusing to change the 1961 Suicide Act.

Every case has individual factors and must be examined on its merits rather than subject to what appears to be a blanket policy of turning a blind eye.

How a person ends their life defines our humanity. The law on it must be decided by Parliament — not a stitch-up between the chattering classes and an amenable DPP.